


all strings attached

by fridayivy



Category: The Human Game (Webcomic)
Genre: feat: too many string metaphors to be comfortable
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-09
Updated: 2018-06-09
Packaged: 2019-05-20 03:52:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 620
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14887109
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fridayivy/pseuds/fridayivy
Summary: You're a being of strings. All you can do is pull. (An introspective drabble from the viewpoint of the Abdicated Harbinger.)





	all strings attached

The world is yours, but you don’t want it.

You never wanted it.

…

But, sad to say, the world has never taken “no” for an answer.

_____

You live like a shadow. You feel like one. Perhaps you were meant to be that way from the very beginning. It’s like the Fates looked down upon your sorry state and left you the way you were because they had better souls to waste their time on. But before they did so, they took pity on you, and left you their strings as a gift (a curse) and tied you to the people around you like you were a lost pet in need of someone to drag you home.

So many strings. You dream of them, restlessly. They form your body, giving you hands and arms and a beating heart that is very much empty. From far away, your silhouette looks human. Up close, it’s evident you are not. You are a pretender. Your strings shift against each other, the smooth sounds producing human words that others understand, but it’s all a facsimile of life. You’re a doll given life, with pretty eyes and a beautiful dress that hide nothing but a cold darkness underneath.

People wouldn’t want to see that darkness. But you give them no choice, sometimes.

Sometimes you have to let it out.

(Your strings have been so caked with blood that it’s hard to believe they weren’t red to begin with.)

____

Other people have strings, too. Since you are made of them, you have a power over them that others do not. You see them in your dreams sometimes - other people are people, unlike you, but you see the strings growing out of their back like branches reaching out towards a sun that simply isn’t there..

But you’re there.

(You’re not the sun. Quite the contrary.)

It’s so easy, honestly, to reach out and tug the strings of others, watching them squirm like caught flies in your grip. It’s not an act that pleases you, but it’s one you can’t help yourself doing, like a child who can’t simply resist the temptation to destroy an anthill on the sidewalk to see what happens. People are ants. You pull their strings and they writhe, scream, clutch their heads as they feel emotions that never belonged to them.

(They belong to you.)

You can’t control it, really. You reach out and pull even when you aren’t meaning to. It doesn’t even help you that much. You’re a virus exerting your influence over others because it’s in your nature to do so, and all it gets you is…well, actually, maybe you _do_ get something out of it. Some kind of enjoyment, perhaps, when you see someone’s eyes widen, opening their mouths in a wordless sob.

 _Suffer with me_ , you whisper, as you pull hard to the point where they’re almost choking on their own blood. S _uffer like I have. See what I’ve seen. Feel what I feel._

 _You now have a taste of what it’s like to be me,_ you hiss _._

_Didn’t expect **that** , did you?_

____

You don’t want the world, but it has laid itself at your feet. You wish it hadn’t done that. The world isn’t what you want. You want what was never given to you instead of these strings that have tainted so many lives in their wake.

But maybe the world is made of strings, you think. Maybe that’s why it whispers _here I am_ into your ear and quietly allows you to be the monster you are.

It wants you to unravel it, to pull until there’s nothing left saving.

 

 

And as you know, you’re very, _very_ good at pulling strings.


End file.
